October 31, 2018

Think of it as the ultimate self check-out experience. Instead of waiting for someone to ring up your grocery items, customers can now simply pick out what they need, scan an app and walk out of the store.

Amazon started it first with its cashier-less Amazon Go store, but now Sam’s Club (owned by Walmart) is following suit with its Sam’s Club Now store, which will open in Dallas next month.

It’s a relatively simple concept that requires zero cashiers. Customers use the Sam’s Club Scan & Go app to add products to their receipt as they shop. When they’re done shopping, customers pay through the app with a single click and just walk out of the store. Instead of traditional checkout lines, there are 700 cameras to keep customers honest and monitor inventory.

Fortunately, Canadian retailers don’t have to worry about all this technology guff – we’ve got cheap labour! Productivity, schmoductivity!

There haven’t been too many good days this month, but we’re closing on a good note!

Click for Big

The TXPR price index was up 1.69% today after six straight trading days of losses; it was only the sixth gain in the month and most of the other five were pretty skimpy!

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.80%, equivalent to 7.54% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long corporates now yield a little over 4.15%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread (in this context, the “Seniority Spread”) is now about 340bp, a slight (and perhaps spurious) widening from the 335bp reported October 24.

HIMIPref™ Preferred IndicesThese values reflect the December 2008 revision of the HIMIPref™ IndicesValues are provisional and are finalized monthly

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2018 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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